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Drupal in the Spotlight

I’ve been developing websites with Drupal for nearly 3yrs now, and I’m still passionate about it. It’s a joy to work with as a programmer, and even straight out of the box you can build complex, or simple web2.0 enabled sites and applications with just a little investment of time and learning. So with that in mind, Im really pleased ot see Drupal getting more and more attention, and particularly happy to see the start of an IBM Developer Works Series focusing on the Open Source framework.

Really, if you’re contemplating building a community oriented site (aka web2.0), don’t reinvent the wheel….

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The Cesspool of User Generated Content

Greg Linden of Findory has an interesting, funny, and nail hitting take on the future of user generated content. In it he says…

Now, many are building their own playgrounds for community-generated content, miniature versions of the World Wide Web. As the experience of the Web shows, we cannot expect the crowds to selflessly combine their skills and knowledge to deliver wisdom, not once the sites attract the mainstream. Profit motive combined with indifference will swamp the good under a pool of muck. To survive, the goal will have to shift from gathering content to uncovering good content.

The experience of the World Wide Web as a whole should serve as a lesson to those building the next generation of community-powered websites. At scale, it is no longer about aggregating knowledge, it is about filtering crap. We need seek the signal in the noise and pull the wisdom from the din.

How true. Even on a relatively small site like Performancing admins spend more time removing dross than writing themselves. Im quite fond of the Digg style of user votes, but ultimately im not certain if those models of content aggregation are sustainable.

A good candidate for quote of the day I think eh?

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BlogRank Gets All Tagged Up

Two weeks ago we launched the BlogRank Top 100 List, and it’s been a fun way to track and discover blogs using Performancing Metrics, our Pro-grade analytics package for blogs. We wanted to extend that list though, and be able to discover new blogs by tag, so after a little late night coding, I’m pleased to introduce you to The BlogRank Tag Cloud.

Aswell as the cloud, you can now see the tags of each blog ranked by BlogRank just under the title of their listing both in the top 100 and any of the hundreds of tags pages. With around 12,000 blogs being tracked, there’s quite a lot to discover, and it’s a fun way to find new blogs and generally meander along the tag trail of links in the system.

Men In Aprons

By far the best discovery of the morning for me was finding a recipe for hot peanut sauce on the wonderful Men in Aprons blog under the cooking tag. Gotta love that name eh?

Hope everyone has fun with this, and it proves useful. Any suggestions, feedback or bugs can be posted here and will be gratefully received….

Enjoy

UPDATE: There was a minor glitch for an hour or so earlier, thanks to Markus that’s been fixed now.

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Free Zooomr Pro Accounts For Bloggers

If you recall I wrote about how Thomas Hawk had been taken on by Zooomr to be the “Chief Evangelist” for the company. Looks like his first initiative should be a good one, or if not a master stroke at least will benefit Performancing members!

The Zooomr Blog has this to say

One of things that we hope Zooomr will become in the months ahead is the photo sharing site of choice for bloggers to host their images on. Since we’re new though and need to get the word out we thought the best way to get bloggers to use our site, in addition to building killer blogger friendly features, was to invite all bloggers to join Zooomr and give them a free Zooomr Pro account.

So get on over there and grab yourself a free upgrade.

Promoting something to bloggers by giving it away isn’t anything new of course. If you have a barrier to trial you need to use every trick in the book to overcome those barriers. Free is a good incentive and the law of reciprocation means people will want to thank you for their freebie. Have you got something you could give away to bloggers that would get you noticed?

They will certainly get some good linkbait and publicity out of this but will they build much momentum on the signups? I am not so sure. For me the barrier to joining Zooomr isn’t cost, it isn’t losing features, it is the community I feel a part of at Flickr. Even if they can make it so everything I have at Flickr is replicated exactly, even down to comments, I will still feel chained to Flickr by my friends and contacts.

I think it is worth pointing out at this point that people link to Flickr because they want to, not because they were incentivised. Will getting a pro account for free cheapen its perceived value in bloggers minds?

To get someone to switch services you need something worth leaving for, something so great it is worth some hassle and loss or something so bad with the old service that you can’t stand it. Changing community isn’t like trying out a new brand of washing powder, people have more invested in Flickr than just their images.

Having said all that I think this is a great move as a first step. Hopefully from this they will as well as all the buzz get lots of feedback for how they can improve. I have some ideas but I am going to wait until their planned upgrade to version 2 of the service.

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What Schmidt Isn’t Saying About Click Fraud

It took me a while to track down this comment from when Google CEO Eric Schmidt originally said that Click Fraud was a “non issue”. Now ZDNet are bringing up the Schmidt quote again in light of recent high profile Click Fraud cases, it’s worth pointing out what he’s not telling you…

Schmid said:

Eventually, the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline, because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks, in other words, the value of the ad declines, so over some amount of time, the system is in-fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution which is to let it happen.

But back in March, noted Search marketing expert Greg Boser blew away Schmidts assertions by pointing out that this would depend on all Adwords advertisers tracking ROI on a direct CPA basis:

That doesn’t account for all the big spending advertisers who are bidding to generate leads that won’t produce revenue for quite some time, or advertisiers who are trying to acquire long-term customers. If you remove click fraud for those types of comapnies (who also happen to bid in many of the highest per click spaces) you will not see any of them raise their bids. That money will simply go back into their bank accounts.

And that to me sounds about right. I don’t claim ot be a click fraud expert, but to dismiss it as “self correcting”, whilst appearing to be very neat and clever (particulary as the GOOG biz model depends upon PPC), just doesn’t ring right, and Bosers arguments make a lot of sense in context.

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Eefoof Splits Ad Revenue with Users

The pretty new and still pretty beta website eefoof.com promises to share advertising income with their users. The model sounds pretty simple: Post your media on eefoof and every pageview creates a share from the total monthly ad income on eefoof.

The idea is great and the service basically looks good at the first glance. A short test …

I went to the website eefoof.com and looked around a little bit. The design is clean but the performance is pretty slow. The offered media types are video, image, audio and flash. Eefoof also offers a forum (2.800 users, 50 topics, 439 posts at the moment of the test) and a developer blog (one article). The published content is the typical teenage stuff (number one link to a nice Japanese video ad with a girl in a bikini). Content theft issues and copyright issues are handled a) by the poster (claims to be author, does not claim to be author = no cash) and b) through community reporting (inappropriate, spam, duplicate). This seems to be a little naive but, well, the page is still beta and somehow it will be refreshing to see the development in the future 🙂

Advertising at the moment is presented by Google and AdBrite. Google is absolutely not the best choice as the pages have no text to offer from which fitting contextual ads could be generated. As not even the little bit of text in the media title, keywords and description is present in the page title or in meta tags you can not expect to see relevant ads. Sorry to say this but using Google contextual ads is really lame!

OK, I registered, received my PW by mail and logged in. The first thing I did was to upload my latest beautiful night shot of the lake Outer Alster in Hamburg through a web form. You can only upload one picture at once and metadata information like EXIF, IPTC or XMP is not imported at all. Instead you have to type in everything (title, keywords, description) manually. Technically this is pretty bad because PHP supports the metadata formats EXIF and IPTC and it is much easier to use a specialized metadata editor instead of filling out a web form for every single JPEG. Even the simple web form is buggy because you can add a longer title then will actually be published. This means double work.

The imported picture looks good and the JPEG quality is well balanced. BTW: Flickr is very bad in balancing the JPEG compression! The same picture on Flickr has 75 KB (500 pixel version) while the image on eefoof only has 28 KB and is also much bigger (793 pixel).

The imported text is buggy because German special characters (ßüöä) are missing. Außenalster becomes Auenalster. This also means double work.

The picture is available only in two sizes: display size and full size. The alt and title tags are filled with standard text and not with picture relevant information.

What really makes me nervous is the missing media navigation. There is absolutely no user centric design at all! You can’t go to the next picture and you don’t have any kind of film strip preview. Not to mention interactive page navigation like “people who have seen this also looked at that”. At the moment you always have to go to the previous overview to get a chance to see the next picture. This really is a negative killer argument for a page which wants to generate income through pageviews. This is even worse then choosing contextual ads which can easily be changed later.

A last point regarding the promotion of eefoof: They don’t even have RSS feds which would be the absolutely easiest way to automatically promote new content.

The last two points lead to my personal scary conclusion that the eefoof guys have absolutely no clue about their site concept.

The basic idea is good. Do you know other services which offer such kind of ad revenue sharing?

Keywords / Categories / Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, eefoof, media, hosting, revenue, database, sharing

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Will Google Ban the W3C?

There’s a hilarious kerfuffle building over the internet standards governing body, the Word Wide Web Consortium, who’s members include pretty much anyone who’s anyone in the big league tech/web space, selling pagerank on this page.

What I want to know is, will Google ban the W3C from it’s index for this heinous crime against the Google biz model (as they would anyone else), or will they administer a slap on the wrist a la wordprsss, Financial Times or a host of other high profile “spammers” over the last few years?

Really, this shit just goes beyond funny…

For starters, getting links on a PR9 at W3C is nothing new. For a few years you were able to buy into the supporters (or maybe it was membership, don’t remember exact details) for about $5k i think, and grab a PR8/9 link, but it got so crowded on the page as word spread that people stopped bothering. (those with half an ounce of common sense anyway), and although this page does not appear to be the same one, and although the cost of getting on it is reduced to $1k, it confounds me as to why the hell should this be a problem?

Im sick to death, though clearly still amused and interested, in the whole “ooh oooh, she did something baaaad… Gooooogle, oh Goooooooogle.. ” shit going on. It’s always narked me, and this just annoys the hell out of me. Should the W3C put the ridiculous NoFollow on all their outbound links to supporters just becuase some arses at Google want to spend more time stamping on what’s bad than promoting what’s good?

Hell no, who made Google king of links anyway?

Oh wait, we did…

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